


Spartacus

by helsinkibaby



Category: FBI (TV 2018)
Genre: Community: 1-million-words, F/M, Het, Pregnancy, Romance, surprise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23449729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helsinkibaby/pseuds/helsinkibaby
Summary: When Maggie comes back after a year away, she finds everything is not as she left it.
Relationships: Kristen Chazal/Jubal Valentine
Comments: 1
Kudos: 40
Collections: 1 Million Words' Weekend Challenge





	Spartacus

**Author's Note:**

> For the weekend challenge - quote “- Chicks can communicate to their mothers before they even hatch.”

Maggie Bell has made it a practice of her working life to always be punctual, but today she walks into 26 Fed early, with a spring in her step and a smile on her face. It's the first morning that she's been back here in almost a year, what was supposed to have been a short enough undercover operation turning much longer due to an unforeseen global pandemic. Maggie had hoped that quarantines and lockdowns would help her to get to the bottom of things more quickly; it turned out the opposite had been true. But it's over now and she's back to her old stomping grounds and she can't wait to see everyone again. 

She's early, but it turns out everyone else is even earlier and she gets warm hugs from everyone as she makes her way to her desk. OA is standing beside it, waiting for her, a smile on his face that is larger than any she's ever seen, Scola and Emily standing beside him. She gets more hugs from them but it's when Kristen stands from her desk that Maggie realises that not everything is the same as she left it. 

"Oh my God!"

It's definitely not the smoothest thing she's ever said in the office, or anywhere else for that matter. It's greeted by chuckles from Scola and Emily, an outright laugh from OA and, thankfully, from Kristen herself who reaches out her arms to pull Maggie into a hug as best she can with an absolutely enormous and absolutely unmistakable baby bump in between them. 

"I didn't mean it like that," Maggie continues as Kristen hugs her. She can feel her cheeks going red but Kristen seems to be taking it all in her stride. 

"It's okay," she says. "I know it's probably the last thing you were expecting."

Actually it wasn't, if for no other reason than the possibility hadn't even anywhere near Maggie's radar. If she'd been expecting to come back and find anyone pregnant, it would have been Mona and OA, who had been doing a pretty strong line before Maggie left. "When?" Maggie asks, apparently unable to form completely sentences. "How?" 

More stifled laughs and Kristen lifts one eyebrow. "Well, you see, Maggie, when a man and a woman love each other very much..." She lets her voice trail off and Maggie rolls her eyes. Kristen grins brightly as she runs her hands over her bump. "I'm almost six months along now," she says and Maggie's surprised because she looks bigger than that. Then again, she thinks, Kristen is so petite that the baby doesn't have many places to go. 

The smile on her face could light up half of Manhattan and Maggie is genuinely happy for her friend. If still a little - a lot - surprised. "Congratulations," she says, hugging Kristen again. Pulling back, she asks her next question. "So, who's the lucky guy? When can I meet him?" 

She means because she wants to see if he's good enough for Kristen, but behind her, Scola snickers. "Sooner than you might think," he mutters and Maggie's head snaps around towards him so quickly that she thinks she might have wrenched her neck. 

_"Scola?"_ She knows she's boggling at him, knows she must look ridiculous but she doesn't actually care about that. Because the last time she'd seen him, he and Kristen and Emily had been going out for drinks with Kristen teasing him about being a high roller but there had been no sense of anything more than partnership, friendship, between them. Maggie had never seen even the remotest bit of flirting, on either of their parts. Still, Maggie supposes stranger things might have happened between partners... but even as she's thinking that, Scola is shaking his head. 

"Oh no, not me." His voice is clear, strong, his gaze looking at something - someone - over Maggie's shoulder. 

Nor is he the only one. Maggie suddenly realises that every pair of eyes - OA's, Emily's, Scola's, even Kristen's - are looking in the same direction. Turning around, she sees Jubal standing on the other side of the partition beside Kristen's desk. He's not looking at Maggie, has only got eyes for Kristen and he's got his hands in his pockets, is rocking backwards and forwards on his feet, a smile on his face that's some cross between slightly embarrassed, immensely proud and insanely happy. 

"Jubal?" She might actually sound more disbelieving, even as she's willing to admit that, having seen Jubal and Kristen working together, it makes an awful lot of sense. 

Jubal tears his eyes away from Kristen to look at Maggie. Lifting his shoulders in the tiniest of shrugs, he intones, "Yes, it is me. I am Spartacus." He stops then, holds up a finger and narrows his eyes as if something has just occurred to him. Then his finger swings to Kristen, more specifically her bump, as his eyes grow wide. "Spartacus," he says. 

Just as quickly, she says, "No," but Jubal is already coming around the partition to stand beside her. 

"Spartacus," he says again, this time with his hand on Kristen's stomach and she's shaking her head. 

"You are not nicknaming our child Spartacus," she says but the second the word leaves her lips, she jumps and Jubal grins, both of them looking down at his hand. "Traitor," she mutters and Jubal looks delighted. 

"What... is... happening?" Maggie feels like she's entered the Twilight Zone and OA lays a hand on her shoulder in what's probably supposed to be comfort. 

"They've been trying to agree on a name for the bump for weeks," he tells her. "Gender neutral because they don't know what they're having. And it looks to me like they've just found one."

"We haven't," Kristen protests. 

"Spartacus," Jubal says again, which leads to another start from Kristen, and this time a laugh from him. "See? I think you're outvoted." The glare that Kristen turns on him only makes him laugh again. 

Maggie looks back at OA, Scola and Emily. "Are they..."

"Always like this?" Emily's tone is dry but she's grinning. "Yep."

"You get used to it." OA's hand is still on her shoulder. 

Before she can say anything else, ask any further questions, Jubal frowns and looks at his phone. "We got a case!" he announces, significantly louder than he had been talking. "I need all eyes into the JOC, right now, and the rest of you too." He glances over at Maggie. "Apart from you. Days of debriefs in your future." He even sounds apologetic. 

Maggie holds up a hand, watches as they all leave, but Kristen lingers a moment. "I'm sorry this got thrown at you," she says. "I wanted to tell you but..."

"Being undercover makes it hard to keep up with your friends." Maggie understands completely. "We'll talk later?" 

Kristen nods, hand smoothing down over her bump once more as she makes her way towards the JOC. Maggie watches her go, shaking her head. “Spartacus,” she mutters. 

She’s obviously got a lot of catching up to do. 

*

Later that day, Kristen stands ostensibly to stretch her legs, makes her way into the kitchenette where she finds Jubal making his usual afternoon cup of coffee. "Hey." His voice is warm when he sees her making her way towards him, but he doesn't make any moves to touch her. They are on the clock and, with the odd exception over the last couple of months that have been bump related, they really don't make an issue of their relationship when they're working. "How are you and Spartacus?" 

Kristen will rail against the use of that nickname for as long as there is breath in her body but apparently the baby has their father's sense of humour because right on cue, there's an almighty kick at the mention of the name. Kristen doesn't know which of them to glare at first. "I'm going to kill you," she settles for telling Jubal and he just snickers as he goes back to stirring his coffee. 

"Threatening a federal agent? There are laws against that." 

Kristen lifts one eyebrow, crosses her arms. "Is this where you offer to cuff and frisk me?" 

It might have been a little too close to the wind, being as they are in work, but Jubal merely waggles his eyebrows. "Is that a possible attempt at a bribe?" A beat. “Because I’m good with that.” 

Running both hands over her bump, Kristen considers the likelihood of either coming to pass as impossible in the extreme. Plus she’s feeling tired and enormous right now, which doesn’t always translate to what he’s teasing her about. She purses her lips, about to point that out to him but he must realise what she’s thinking because before she can look back up at him, he’s standing beside her, close enough that her currently enhanced olfactory senses get a rather pleasing whiff of his cologne, taking her thoughts elsewhere. “And before you say anything,” he says, voice low just in case anyone should walk in, “I always think you’re gorgeous.” 

She smiles; she can’t help it. She always does when he talks to her in that tone of voice, with that look in his eyes. She’d blame it on hormones if it hadn’t been happening well before that. “I wasn’t looking for a compliment,” she tells him and his lips twitch, his eyes dance. “But thank you.” 

He grins and for a moment, she thinks he’s going to kiss her. He pauses for long enough to consider it but then his eyes glance to the door and when he looks back at her, he raises his coffee cup to his lips instead. “Seen much of Maggie today?” he asks as he sets it down. “They seem to be keeping her pretty well tied up.” 

Knowing there are details that neither of them will ever be privy to, Kristen hadn’t bothered asking Maggie for any specifics when Maggie appeared at her desk at lunch. “Just for a minute between debriefs,” she says. “She asked me about grabbing dinner later. You want to come?”

Jubal actually chuckles. “I think Maggie wants to ask you questions she’ll never ask if I’m there.” He’s probably not wrong. “You go; I’ll stick around here, get some paperwork done.” He lifts his cup and she knows he’s doing it to hide a grin. “You can bring me home a doggy bag... if you leave any, that is.” 

She rolls her eyes, even as she’s laughing. Her increased appetite is another thing he’s been teasing her about but considering she’d had none for the first three months, she figures she has some catching up to do. “Very funny.” 

“But seriously.” He reaches out, touches her shoulder, the same way he touches dozens of people in the JOC, nothing to see here folks. “Go. Have fun. Answer five million questions. Call me when you’re ready, I’ll come pick you up.” 

"Okay." Kristen nods. "I'll see you later then." 

Jubal nods too, just as his hand reaches out and rests, just for a moment, on her stomach. It's warm from where it had been cradling his coffee cup and Kristen smiles to herself as the baby shifts, almost like they knew Jubal's hand was there. "Bye, Spartacus," Jubal says, his smile becoming a full on grin when he feels the reaction that Kristen is slowly getting used to. 

"I'm still annoyed about that," she tells him but Jubal only lifts one eyebrow. 

"No you're not." 

"No," she sighs. "I'm not." But she keeps that until she's on her way back to her desk. 

*

Maggie and Kristen end up heading to an Italian restaurant not too far away from 26 Fed and Maggie wastes no time in proving Jubal right, leaning across the table the second the waiter took their order. "I'm not even going to pretend to make small talk," she says, her pony tail bobbing, her eyes alight. "I've been gone for a year and I've missed so much, I want to know everything." She pauses, wrinkles her nose. "All right, maybe not everything. You can keep some of the details to yourself. But most things." 

Kristen laughs as she takes a sip of her water. "I'm not even sure where to begin." 

Maggie gives her a start. "You and Jubal?"

"Yeah." Another sip of water to give her time to think, but not too much. Otherwise she'd be in and out of the bathroom for half of the meal. "Me and Jubal." She pauses again, knowing she's about to blow Maggie's mind. "Okay, so the first thing you should know? Is that we've been off and on for a while." Maggie opens her mouth to ask what is probably the logical question, Kristen answers it before she can ask. "A while as in, before you started with the unit."

Maggie's jaw drops, comically so. Kristen waits for the words to settle. "You were hooking up with Jubal the whole time I've known you two?" 

Kristen's nose wrinkles. She hates the phrase 'hooking up' even if it's probably technically accurate. "Sort of," she says carefully. "We'd go through stages of seeing one another, of going home together but then we'd... Jubal... would get worried about being my boss, about the age difference, about work..." She shook her head. What had seemed important then seems inconsequential now. "When I went to Quantico, I told myself, this is it. Clean break, when you get back, you'll be completely over him. Except I wasn't. But nothing happened... not until I got hurt." 

Maggie's eyes grow dark and she swallows hard, crossing her arms on the table and shifting in her seat. That's not a happy memory for either one of them, so Kristen presses on. "Jubal came to see me. Every day at first, then the days he couldn't make it, he'd call, or text. He didn't push, he was just... there. But he never made a move."

Maggie is grinning broadly now. "That must have driven you crazy."

"Oh my god, so crazy," Kristen agrees. "So finally I ran completely out of patience and asked him where his mind was. He told me..." She feels her throat tighten, this being yet another thing she'd blame it on pregnancy hormones if it didn't happen every time she thought about this. "He told me that when I was hurt... he realised he didn't want to lose me. That it wasn't a fling, or a hook-up... that what we had was the real deal. Or he wanted it to be. But if I didn't want that, he was fine with that. Which was a total lie, by the way." 

"Obviously." Maggie laughs. "So how long did it take for him to figure out you felt the same way?"

Kristen presses her lips close together. "I think the fact that he didn't leave my apartment for the next two days was its own answer." 

Maggie, for once, looks completely speechless. "Remember when I said you could leave out some details?" she quips and Kristen takes a sip of her water, thinks to herself that it's a good job she didn't tell Maggie the entire truth, which was that they'd barely left Kristen's bed for two days, never mind her apartment. Which brings something else to mind; hell she might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. 

“Well since we’re going there,” she says, keeping her voice low, “you remember all those jokes and memes going around about a quarantine baby boom?” She pauses just long enough for Maggie’s eyes to bug out. “Maybe don’t make any of those around Jubal.” 

“Oh my god.” Maggie covers her face with her hands and Kristen’s not sure whether she’s laughing or just can’t look at her any longer. When Maggie drags her hands down her face, steeples them in front of her lips, Kristen knows it’s the former. “When did you tell people?”

That’s good for another laugh from Kristen as she runs her hands over her bump. “Um...” She pretends to consider it. “About four months ago?” Maggie laughs at that too. “Probably a little earlier than we really should, but we didn’t have much choice... morning sickness was kicking my ass - I so was not an advertisement for pregnancy during the first trimester - and there’s only so many times you can call in sick before people start asking questions.” 

“And once people knew you were pregnant, the next question was ‘Who’s Dad?’, I get it.” The fact that it had been Maggie’s question as well wasn’t lost on either one of them. “Wow,” she continues, sitting back in her chair, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you’re having a baby.” 

“Me either sometimes.” As if the baby knows they’re being talked about, it pushes against Kristen’s hand. She looks down, follows the path of the baby’s movement with her hand and when she looks up again, she sees a look on Maggie’s face that’s almost wistful. “If you’d told me... I mean, it’s not that long ago I was off to Quantico, all ready to be a field agent... now here I am, back in the JOC, getting ready to go on maternity leave, trying to figure out how we can make our jobs work with a baby...”

“I’m thinking Jubal in the JOC with a baby carrier?” Maggie suggests and Kristen would repeat that to Jubal if she didn’t think he’d absolutely jump at the idea. 

“I’m so happy, Maggie,” she says instead and Maggie’s grin is as bright as Kristen’s ever seen it. 

“I’m happy for you. Really.” Maggie spreads her hands wide. “Now, tell me... what else have I missed?”

Kristen obliges, keeps the gossip and funny stories coming all through the meal, and she considers it a victory that she only has to use the ladies’ room once. When they’re settling the bill - and Maggie insists on paying, calls it payment for all the news - Maggie tilts her head as Kristen takes out her cell phone. “Do you need me to drop you home?” she asks. 

Kristen shakes her head. “Jubal stayed at the office... he said to call me when we were done, he’ll come pick me up.” 

The kind of face Maggie makes is usually reserved for puppie videos and cute kid pics. “That’s so sweet.” Then she frowns. “Please don’t tell him I said that.” 

Kristen promises to keep her secret, grinning as she calls Jubal and though she tells Maggie she doesn’t have to, Maggie waits with her until Jubal’s car pulls up and she gets inside. Jubal waits until Maggie walks away before he leans over, presses a kiss to Kristen’s lips, laying a hand on her stomach. “Hey, you,” he says. “Hey, Spartacus.” Right on cue, the inevitable happens and his grin brightens. “I will never get sick of that.” 

“Speak for yourself.” But Kristen’s only mock grumbling as she fastens her seatbelt, shifting to make herself comfortable as Jubal starts to drive. They chat quietly as they move through the city streets, the warmth and motion of the car combining to make Kristen’s eyes grow heavy. By the time they get home, all she wants to do is crawl into bed and Jubal can probably guess that, loops his arm around her shoulders and lets her lean on him as they walk inside. 

She goes straight to their bedroom, strips off her clothes and changes into an old t-shirt that once upon a time had belonged to Jubal. Once she’s removed her makeup and her hair is plaited, she goes back out towards the living room, sees Jubal about to sit down on the couch with some of yesterday’s leftover Chinese food. “I got you a fork,” he says, holding up his hand to reveal two of the implements and she gives him a look. 

“You know I just had a meal with Maggie, right? With no leftovers?”

Jubal gives her the same look right back. “I know. But when has that ever stopped Spartacus?” 

Kristen can’t exactly argue with that so she doesn’t, just drops down beside him as elegantly as she can - which is to say, not very - and lets him help to pull her legs up so they are resting across his knees. He eats his dinner like that and she only steals a forkful or two as they chat some more about their days. 

When the plate is empty, they shift again, Kristen sitting properly on the couch with Jubal stretching out, resting his head against her stomach, placing a gentle kiss there. He gets a kick for his troubles and he laughs as he rubs Kristen’s stomach in that exact spot. “Less of that, little one,” he says quietly. “Mom’s gonna need some sleep.” 

Kristen feels a soft smile come to her lips as she runs her fingers through his hair. This is her new favourite way to end the day, the two of them curled up together, just like this. There’s something about the way Jubal looks when he’s talking to her bump, something about the tone of his voice, that she will never grow tired of. She’s seen it when he’s with Tyler and Abigail of course, but this is different somehow, more.

“Good luck with that,” she murmurs, her hand still moving through his hair, fingernails scratching at the short hair at the nape of his neck. 

“Bedtime story then?” He reaches for the book on the coffee table, finds the place where he’d stopped the previous evening. “Little Women, chapter nine,” he reads, his lips still a hair’s breadth from her stomach. Spartacus - and Kristen’s given up the fight on this one - rolls slowly towards his voice and Kristen’s fighting back sudden tears. 

Jubal’s hand, the one that’s not holding the book, closes around hers, squeezes her fingers tightly because he knows, he always knows. 

Just like Kristen knows that right here, right now, she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.


End file.
